Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Teaching techniques
In foreign language teaching, pronunciation is the one area
where it is generally agreed that imitation is the essence of the
learning process. Some people are better at imitation than
others, but one thing is clear: in order to imitate correctly one
must have heard correctly what is to be imitated.
Unfortunately there is not so much the teacher can do to help
his students to hear accurately. He can direct their attention
to sound differences, give them plenty of opportunity to
listen, but he cannot give them the ability to hear them. On
occasion he can make the task easier by separating out the
items to be heard. If the students cannot hear a /ts/
combination at the end of words like cats, mats, and
persistently hear either just /kæt/ or /mæt/ or /kæs/ or /mæs/,

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the teacher can contrast /t/ with /ts/ and /s/ with /ts/ separately.
(Failure to make the plural correctly is often due to a
pronunciation problem like this one, as are some other
apparently grammatical errors.)
As far as actual pronunciation is concerned, the teacher
cannot rely upon explanations of tongue position or even
diagrams and the use of mirrors. Apart from a few items such
as lip and front of tongue positions, the sensory-motor skills
involved are normally well below the level of consciousness
and are not easy to deal with consciously. Some kind of
intuitive mimicry is necessary. It is sometimes found,
incidentally, that when the classroom pronunciation
demanded by the teacher does not accord with that which
the students hear around them outside the school, they can
often mimic the required accent effectively in order to mock
it, and their apparent inability to produce it in class is
psychological rather than physical. Another source of help
may be some noises used by the students when speaking their
own language, i.e. onomatapoeic noises for sounds of birds,
the wind, trains, etc. In a few cases these might constitute an
English phoneme, as the sounds for the buzzing of the bee or
for requesting silence do in English.
For successful imitation, students need to listen to
themselves. Most people cannot really monitor their own
speech, and help from tape recorders can be invaluable.
Hearing himself on tape in contrast with the speech model not
only convinces the student that he has, or has not, achieved
success, but gives him clues for further improvement.
As with all learning, motivation is a highly significant
factor in pronunciation. The more it can be made necessary
for the student to improve his speech, the more rewarding will
the teaching be. Motivation can be real or simulated. Where it
is possible, actual contact with speakers outside the class in
real communicative contexts (shops, etc.) is of course ideal.
Where this is not possible, games in the classroom which are
so designed that either hearing correctly or speaking correctly
are built in as an essential part of the game provide a context
where communication is felt to depend on accurate speech.
For example, a class can be divided into teams, standing or
sitting in rows. The first person in each row is given an
instruction to whisper to the next person, who whispers it to

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the next, and so on down the line. When the last student has
received the instruction he must obey it quickly. If it is worded
to highlight a pronunciation point so that an error in speech
or recognition at any point along the row might occur,
students will in fact be engaged in pronunciation practice in a
meaningful context. Thus, if the instruction were ‘Draw a
ship on the blackboard’, and students had difficulty
distinguishing /i/ and /I/, the row which produced a drawing
of a sheep would not be the winner!
Given the aim of encouraging accurate imitation, the
teacher’s choice of what to teach and in what order to teach it,
depends partly on his decision as to what sound features are
essential for intelligibility in the variety of English he has to
teach. The degree of difficulty which these sound features
present to the students is governed largely by the sound
patterns of their native language. By comparing the sets of
phonemes and their commonly used allophones in the native
language and English, the teacher can assess the areas of
pronunciation where difficulty is likely to occur. He will not
necessarily be able to predict exactly what errors the student
will make, but he will know which sounds or supra-segmental
aspects will cause trouble. Although the different languages of
the world have all drawn on different sounds and sound
features from the infinite range that the human vocal tract
could produce, the underlying principle of system of distinctive
contrasts with permitted variations is common to all.
Without information about all parts of the system, it is
easy to fall into errors of over-simplification. Speakers of
German might be thought, for example, to have no trouble
with /b/, /d/ or /g/, since these occur in German as well as in
English. But inspection of their place in the sound system of
German will show that they never occur in final position, so
that a German speaker pronounces ‘cab’ as /kæp/, ‘bud’ as /
b
∧t/, and ‘dog’ as /dok/. The point to remember is that the
learners who are not in the habit, in their own language, of
hearing certain distinctions will just not hear them in
English, and therefore will not pronounce them either. The
reason why a German learner might persist in these errors, in
spite of being able to say /b/, /d/ and /g/ perfectly well, is that
he has simply failed to hear that they occur at the end of
words in English. Likewise a French speaker, who uses /i/ and

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/I/ interchangeably and has never learned to distinguish
them, may not even notice the difference between ‘live’ and
‘leave’ and may think they are homonyms. Even a speaker of
a language like Spanish which has the two sounds but uses
them differently (not as different phonemes but as different
allophones of one phoneme) will fail to use them correctly in
English because he will expect a different degree of
significance to attach to them. Attention to the whole system,
and adequate recognition practice, are the chief keys to
successful pronunciation teaching.
Native language interference applies equally strongly to the
supra-segmentals. Foreign judgments of the English as
unfriendly, or even as very polite, are often based on faulty
interpretation of their intonation, whereas the English
judgment of certain foreign speakers as rude or aggressive is
usually based on a likewise faulty interpretation. The native
language habits of intonation and stress and general tone of
voice are so all-pervading and deeply ingrained and further
out of awareness than vowels and consonants which can often
be physically demonstrated, that people find it difficult to
accept that there is a systematic variation from one language
to another. Thus, if a foreign speaker makes a segmental
pronunciation error, he is excused as a foreigner and his
speech is interpreted more or less correctly depending on the
context. But if he makes a supra-segmental error, a judgment is
made of his personality, not of his language. Thus a German
speaker might call someone and use a falling intonation, ‘Mr
Smith!’, as would be appropriate in German. This will make
him sound authoritative and possibly impolite in English, for
gentle polite calling requires a rising intonation. Such
intonation differences are a source of misunderstanding even
among native speakers of English from different regions.